After people started asking questions about it, he also voluntered: “aiming for orbital flight by June (2019)” and “won’t land propulsively (…). Ultra light heat shield and high mach control surfaces are what we can’t test well without orbital entry. I think we have a handle on propulsive landings.”

I also put my two cents in, in the comments of the two above mentioned videos and here’s what my toughts were (for reference, Scott was suggesting that the mini BFR Ship might be more of a Falcon 9 second stage with fins and a heat shield rather than a bonafide miniature BFR Ship):

I do question carbon fiber with enamel paint is enough, especially when scaled down to 5mms thickness. Compression plasma are extreme. Moon return mission could be twice the speed as an orbital mission. Twice the plasma.

Also, PICA is not so much a paint as an infusion of resin that inter mixes with the carbon fiber structural mesh of the heat shield. The “phenolic resin” then is vaporized by the heat of reentry and forms a layer of opaque gas around the area from which it vaporizes. This gas is what stops energy from the glowing hot compressed atmosphere from reaching the surface of the ship’s hull. Here’s some awesome pictures of the “Stardust” heatshield’s carbon matrix being depleted of its resin (Stardust entered from interplanetary orbit, which is an entry velocity of more than 12500 m/s):

That snowy stuff in slice 30 is the untouched resin. Note also that about 6 mm of heatshield is completely gone (the “char surface” is “slice 0”, which is 6 mm below where the top of the heatshield used to be. Thus, the first 6 mm have been burned off in the atmosphere of Earth and are unavailable for examination. There’s a lot of untouched material because PICA was a new material back then, and they purposefully over did it on the thickness.